Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

Rating:
Summary: Still reeling from the information
Review: I read this in two days--once I plowed into Schlosser's account of the beginnings of the fast food industry, the manipulations and money-wielding political machinations behind the scenes and those *not* behind the scenes, the OSHA opponents and the raw disregard on the part of industry players to ignore health, safety...much less, life, I couldn't stop reading and absorbing this mountain of information. Sure, there's opinion here too, but it was so well documented and supported that I can forgive a few out-of-context statements (as some reviewers have criticized Eric) that were made in the book

I can't stop thinking about all of the issues raised: How can OSHA be even more deregulated that it already is? Feeding animals to animals? Feeding animals that ate other animals' waste and byproducts to humans? Feeding excrement-laced meat from those same animals to humans? Even if meatpackers can't regard humane animal treatment, and I'm not saying it's forgivable, then why they can't they at least regard what goes down the gullets of humans (their own species)? The portrayal of the treatment of low-paid, injured, unprotected workers was painful but eye opening. Being on the verge of a 100% veggie life myself, this book sure helped pave the way for more thoughtful examination of future eating choices and processed food company support -- or not. One more note: if the folks who operate and legislate this industry discovered one spec of excrement in their children's hamburgers while dining out or in, don't you think all hell would break loose? Just because we can't see it doesn't mean we should buy it and eat it. Thank you to the writer for exposing this ugly/unhealthy/poorly legislated side of an all American pastime.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I stopped eating fast food once i read this book. A must have to educate your friends.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: 1) Ignore the review that accuses Schlosser of lying about fast food employees microwaving burgers in the 1950's. "Once you read that," the reviewer writes, "you can't take anything else seriously." Of course, the microwave oven was invented right after WWII and was marketed to restaurants in 1954.

Point is, what Schlosser does here is present a startling array of facts that speak for themselves. He rarely makes judgement calls, and simply drops fact after fact after fact. The result, for the reader, is a no-brainer.

This book is fabulous, not only for its meticulous research, but for the tone in which it is written. For once I felt like I was reading an activist book that wasn't telling me how to think.

Rating:
Summary: Stay Away From Audio Version!
Review: First off -- the content of the book is great. The statistics are presented in a somewhat biased fashion though. For example, the author mentions how the real value of minimum wage has actually decreased over the years. But when he mentions that it only cost $950 to become one of the first McDonald's franchisees (to illustrate how much it has increased over time), he neglects to present what that value would be in today's dollars. It seems that an apples-to-apples consistency in his writings would detract from his arguments.

But that's just a small quibble. The real problem with this is in the audio version. The narrator is horrendous! Where the heck did they get this man?!? I've never heard someone speak with the inflections this fellow does. Somehow he manages to stress every third word, trying to make it sound like some amazing fact: "the store was LOCATED near the EXIT ramp of the I-25 INTERstate." Augh! He gave me a headache just listening to him. Stick with the hard copy book for "Fast Food Nation".

Rating:
Summary: Useful information clouded by his political views...
Review: In recent months, across the web I have seen this book in people's reading mentioned on various blogs. I decided I would like to read this book for myself. I had every reason to like what this book would tell me, I eat fast food infrequently, don't like what it is doing to America, it's culture, or our health. All that being said while I think this book has interesting and useful information, but one must read it with health skepticism.

I am an aspiring author, but as I study my craft I read the words repeated over and over again "Let the story tell itself". My impression of Fast Food Nation is that Mr. Schlosser had a very set opinion approaching this work and looked for answers that matched his thesis. He uses facts and studies very effectively to represent these viewpoints. When facts are unavailable he uses an anecdotes to suffice and leaving the implication that his one story is the norm. Lastly when this method fails him he uses someone else's opinion and leaves it to give the impression of the overall state of the industry.

There are numerous examples of this approach, but I will briefly cover a few. On page 118 he uses the words of a Bert Moulton to implies collusion and price-fixing throughout the potato growing industry without any direct evidence. On 174 he blames supervisors for widespread sales of amphetamines to meat packing plants. In describing and E. coli out break he describes on page 208 that no direct source of the outbreak can be traced, he states that the meat came from a specific plant that was dirty according to federal inspectors so therefore it was the source.

His political viewpoint is accented throughout the book. He repeatedly uses terms such as "right-wing", "conservative", and "republican" in a negative context, but is careful not to include them in the index to show how wide spread his bias is in the text. This shows through to the additional section where he discusses the changes since the original book. Specifically he goes after the Wall Street Journals editorial staff as right wing without mention of the reviewers name or what was wrong with the review. It isn't until page 277 that he confesses that he was light on the role of the Clinton administrations record and ties to the Tyson family. After a bare three sentences he turns to attack the current administration.

Finally, the charge of American cultural imperialism rings hollow. He notes on page 244 of various acts against McDonald's by Dutch anarchists. McDonald's uses an orderly system for distribution, a natural target for an anarchist regardless of culture. He mentions that one McDonalds was blown up in Cali, Columbia in 1997, I just wonder how many other buildings were blowup in Cali that year? On Page 250 he mentions Plauen only having McDonalds the only store open in the town square on Unification day in Germany. I'll confess to have never been to Plauen, but if he knew anything of German culture he might know that all businesses close in Germany except restaurants. He continues in last few pages of the chapter implying blame for the high unemployment in East Germany on McDonalds and other Western institutions, I am sorry this doesn't wash. The Wall fell in Eastern Germany to an economic system whose end had come. Afterwards it has been a difficult adjustment period for those people, trying to get over the chains of Communism and it cheapens those people's struggles, sacrifices, and dreams to use it as a cheap plot device to drive a personal opinion.

This book has some positive characteristics, I agree with it's statements about the danger of genetically altered food. I enjoyed when he talked about the good actors in the industry and feel they deserved a full chapter, rather than a few paragraphs. This would have been a better book if he had let the story tell itself, rather then use it as a personal opportunity to push his political agenda. If he had then I think Fast Food Nation would have been great book instead of just an Upton Sinclair knockoff.

Rating:
Summary: There's Reason for Concern, but Drop the Scapegoating
Review: This is a mostly compelling but ultimately unconvincing diatribe on the fast food industry. The problem may be the title of the book, because Schlosser has essentially used the term "fast food nation" on a conceptual level to describe large social processes and phenomena that are tangentially related to the fast food business. Therefore this is about much more than the history of McDonald's or KFC, but as sociology the book does not succeed.

The societal ills that Schlosser describes throughout the book are definitely worth worrying about - the horrific conditions of the meatpacking industry, the elimination of small farmers by agribusinesses, the replacement of so-called "real" jobs with those performed by the growing underpaid and illiterate workforce, and the increasing obesity of Americans. These trends are all quite alarming, but the causes and effects are infinitely more complicated than Schlosser will have you believe in this book. He'll try to convince you that the meatpacking business is corrupt ONLY because Republicans refuse to allow regulations after getting donations from the big fast food companies. Sure fast food employs an exploding number of illiterate and poorly paid employees, but it's not like these people wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the industry, as Schlosser implies. And of course Americans are getting fatter and less healthy, but this is the result of many different factors, only one of which is the convenience of fast food. Other factors would include lack of access to exercise equipment, a car-obsessed infrastructure, and the general couch potato culture caused by too much television.

Throughout most of this book Schlosser behaves more like a very paranoid conspiracy theorist who thinks that the government spies on the people with brain wave detectors. But in his case, the villain is the fast food business. Sure there are many problematic trends in American society, described above, which we should all absolutely worry about. But at most, the fast food business is INDIRECTLY involved in these problems. Schlosser however uses the industry as a scapegoat that is the direct cause of all these dire trends. At one point he even complains that high school kids in Colorado no longer wear cowboy hats to school. Most of us would just assume that these kids have a fashion sense that is in the current century! But Schlosser implicates fast food in this "problem" as well.

The underlying flaw throughout this book is Schlosser's implication that the industry is maliciously forcing fast food, and all of its related social ills, on an innocent public in a greedy rush for profits. This is a simplistic and one-sided theory. Real life is far more complicated. The industry has grown to such gigantic levels because people WANT fast food, while the industry encourages them to buy more, which is all completely capitalistic behavior. In the end, you will find that there are indeed reasons to worry about the social problems described in this book, but you will have to disregard Schlosser's simplistic scapegoating of the fast food business. True solutions (if any) will have to be found outside of this book.

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Summary: Fast Food Nation
Review: Cziment, Stephanie
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001, 270 pages

Eric Schlosser: Coming from a background of writing fiction, Schlosser entered journalism in the early 1990's. He has won many journalistic awards such as the National Magazine Award and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award both for stories for the Atlantic Monthly, and he has written for the Rolling Stone. Fast Food Nation is his first book.

Thesis: As Upton Sinclair used his book, The Jungle, to not only shed light on the corruption towards the process of meat packing in America, but the corruption behind businesses, Eric Schlosser uses his book, Fast Food Nation, to reveal the power behind fast food businesses, its connections and effect on our economy, real estate, environment, health, and the actual food preparation process.

Summary and Analysis: Any day in the United States, one quarter of the adult population eats fast food, that is just one of the many amazing (mostly shocking) facts given to the readers from Schlosser. Fast Food Nation proves that fast food is not just a product, but also an American way of life- sinking in to and controlling our economy and environment. The monopoly of the fast food companies is shocking- McDonald's has over one million people working for it; McDonalds alone is responsible for 90% of the country's new jobs. Schlosser breaks down how these companies get control over the market (wiping out competition, "encroachment", the Small Business Administration- SBA), and presents readers with a history of how these restaurants came to be. The actual process of supplying food, meat packing and potato farms, is another horror revealed- some supervisors supply their workers with speed, so they can keep the pace of slaughtering 400 cattle a hour (it use to be 175), and one-third of meatpackers get injured each year. Schlosser uses fast food as a way to judge the standards of businesses in America. Using it as an example of what companies will do to gain control at the expense of their workers, customers, and economy.

Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing
Review: I really wanted to like this book; I don't eat fast food, my parents were once (very disatisfied) franchisees of a fast-food chain, and I grew up in Colorado Springs (a city featured prominently in the book).

However, I constantly found myself staring at sentences, thinking, 'what was the point of that?' I noticed that Schlosser consistently inserts "facts" without context or content in order to make the industry appear even more insidious. For instance, in one passage, while citing the negative aspects of corporate/school advertising campaigns, he notes that "The Consumers Union found Pizza Hut's Book It! Program--which awards a free Personal Pan Pizza to children who reach targeted reading levels--to be 'highly commercial.'" That's it. There are some statistics about student participation in the program, but no explanation about what "highly commercial" means, no explanation why this program is bad. It's just name-calling. In addition, it seems that every profile of a fast food chain's founder has the inevitable comment that he is/was a contributor to the Republican party. Is this relevant at all? It's as if he's taking for granted that his audience is liberal, and if he just drops the right "code words," we'll all just nod our heads and say, "Yup, that's evil all right."

It took me a while to figure out what exactly I disliked about this book, but another reviewer here hit it right on the head: Schlosser wants us to think that this is an objective look at the industry, but in reality it's just a diatribe. I wouldn't even mind it being a diatribe if it didn't rely on cheap tricks to get a response.

Rating:
Summary: It's hard to write a single review of Fast Food Nation
Review: It's hard to write a single review of Eric Schlosser's _Fast Food Nation_. This book tells the story of the great American business: how forward-thinking entrepreneurs took hold of the spirit of progress and brought hot, tasty, affordable food to the world. But that's not the book Mr. Schlosser wants you to read. He wants you to see scandal: Fast food fatty and artificially flavored! Fast food jobs pay minimum wage! People have to do what their boss tells them (even if he's dumb)! This is not news and it's not evil unless you believe it's a sin to compete in business. It's a fascinating look at an industry, and if Mr. Schlosser wanted to create a scandal he should have written a book about something else.

And he almost does, raising the alarm about the beef packing industry. He describes work and food safety situations barely improved since _The Jungle_, with grave effect on human life. What is missing is how this is the fault of fast food, as if grocery chains and independent restaurants wouldn't demand low beef prices as well. The fact that government-sponsored school lunch programs use a much less safe beef supply than McDonald's is most alarming in the end.

Rating:
Summary: Good book. Very informative
Review: This book was wonderful. The vast history in the book was very interesting. I couldn't put it down I had to finish it in one weekend. From reading reviews before I bought the book I thought It would be alot of gross out stuff, but it wasn't. This author really took the time to know what he was talking about. His research was thorough and he also gave credit to anyone who deserved it. This isn't just a book bashing the unhealthfulness of Fast Food, but rather a commentary on what the Fast Food industry is doing to economies and waistlines all over the world.

I must admit my parents weren't big on Fast Food to begin with and I never ate that much of it, but now I will not be eating any of it. My husband is a fast food junky, but I am trying my best to steer him away from it. After reading this book, I made it clear that I better never catch him eating a Fast Food burger.

Bottom Line: Extermely interesting book. This should be a mandatory book on high school reading lists.